Time Travelers: Views from Children's Literature New England

Children's Literature New England had its genesis in 1987, but it has historical ties to the Simmons College Center for the Study of Children's Literature which was founded in 1975. Many of the people associated with Children's Literature New England were active in the Center and continue their work with the new organization. The Proceedings of the 1989 Children's Literature New England conference read like a Who's Who in Children's Literature. Jill Paton Walsh, Paul and Ethel Heins, Susan Cooper, Eleanor Cameron, and Rosemary Sutcliff are but six of the over twenty easily recognized names which grace the cover of this collection.

In an overview of the aims of Children's Literature New England, Barbara Harrison suggests that the Stimmer institutes are a continuation of the Simmons program and that the institutes form a continuum. That is, each institute deals with a specific theme in children's literature, but all are designed to study the literature seriously and to make critical evaluative statements about it. The first institute dealt with the child in literature, the second with journeys, the third considered survival, and the fourth the heroic ideal. The 1991 institute, held at Williams College, bore the title "Rogues and Rebels: Symbols of Resistance." The theme of the 1989 institute and of this Proceedings is time. Papers deal with how we perceive time and how children perceive it in their reading and in their lives. Writers also discuss the importance of time in the telling of their own stories and recurring time motifs in children's books.

Eleanor Cameron defines time fantasy as it appears in her Court of the Stone Children and in other novels as well, notably Ursula Le Guin's The Beginning Place and Always Coming Home. Cameron compares time fantasy to the playing of a chess game. Each piece, or character, can move only in certain ways, but within these limits lies the opportunity for creative and critical thinking/writing/reading to create a game, or story, that has infinite variety. Cameron suggests that time exists differently for children than for adults, that for children it is an interweaving, or perhaps a circular pattern, not a continuous line, as adults are more likely to perceive it.

Diana Paolitto was the only psychologist speaking at the institute, and she worked not with the use of time as text but with story sequence and with children's perceptions of clock time/past calendar time. By individually interviewing forty children aged four to fourteen, she was able to discover some of the perceptions they had regarding time, specifically in response to Come Away from the Water, Shirley, and Tuck Everlasting. Four to six-year-olds responded in varying ways. Some thought the action in Shirley occurred in a time period of two minutes; others suggested one hundred hours. Older children were able to estimate more accurately the time (an afternoon) that Shirley required because they knew how much time passes when one goes to the beach. They reinforced their opinions by noting the sky and the sun's movement in it. In responding to time in Tuck Everlasting, they counted days with the story, added other times (evening and morning, for example), and took into account specific dates mentioned within the text to calculate time elapsed in the story.

Most of the writers and speakers at Children's Literature New England give a specific sense of the importance of time as it personally relates to them. Virginia Hamilton, for example, seems to remain at one with the generations of family that came before her. Like most of the writers included here, she also has a distinctive sense of place. Susan Cooper certainly does; because of the antiquity of the setting in her Dark is Rising series, her old ones can move back and forth within time to create a story that has few boundaries as far as time is concerned, and place ties her themes together as...